Killing Wussification

What's with the ongoing "wussification" name-calling by
cable chit-chat provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity? While Hannity and others have offered
to be waterboarded - a sign they hope will convey just how mild the process is
- Coulter has compared CIA interrogation techniques to the sexual highjinks of
disgraced politicians. (In her
fondness for an easy mix of sex and violence, Coulter may have been right at
home at Abu Ghraib.) While I
regard her - and other "wussy" callers - as beneath contempt, I have been
disturbed that intelligent friends of mine cite her "work" as evidence of what
they want to believe: that the enhanced interrogation techniques that so-called
liberals call torture are nothing more than fraternity pranks.

Well, Ms. Coulter, work on this: is murder a frat prank?

There has been a lot of arcane talk about the memos produced
by the Office of Legal Counsel about specific "no-touch" torture techniques
which, out-of-context, can sound harmless, if a bit weird. (In one of Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Steven Bradbury, he
notes that, while it's OK to strip a detainee naked and make him wear a diaper,
one must be careful not to chafe the skin with the Velcro straps when taking
them on and off.)

What has been mostly missing from the recent debate about
detainee abuse is that over 100 detainees died in custody during the war on
terror. Nearly half of those
deaths have been classified as homicides.
For all sorts of reasons, it's worth looking at one case in particular. It's the story of Dilawar, a 22-year
old taxi driver whose murder was at the center of my film, "Taxi to the Dark
Side."

Dilawar lived in Yakubi, a small peanut-farming village in
Afghanistan, not far from the Pakistan border. Shy and a bit of a dreamer, Dilawar drove a taxi to support
his wife and young daughter because he wasn't really cut out for the hard work
of farming. On December 1, 2002, he was carrying three paid fares home from the
provincial capital of Khost when he and his passengers were stopped and
arrested by Afghan militia.
Accused of launching a rocket attack on Camp Salerno, a nearby US base,
Dilawar and his passengers were turned over to American forces.

On December 5, Dilawar was flown to Bagram, the headquarters
for US forces in Afghanistan and a key detention and interrogation center,
where he was designated a PUC - person under control - number 421. Five days later, he was dead.

Only a week before, another detainee named Habibullah had
died. The medical examiner
noted that he had a pre-existing pulmonary condition. But it was the beatings he sustained at Bagram that led to
the cause of his death: a blood clot that traveled to his lungs. As one member of the 519th
Military Intelligence Battalion recalled, "two prisoners dying within a week of each
other. That's bad."

Indeed it was.

The army initially declared in a press release that both men
had died of natural causes. But an
enterprising NY Times reporter named Carlotta Gall managed to track down Dilawar's family in
Yakubi. Dilawar's brother,
Shahpoor, showed her a folded paper he had received with Dilawar's body. He couldn't read because it was in
English. It was a death
certificate. As Gall scanned to
the cause of death, a small "x" was marked in the box for "Homicide."

Further investigation revealed that Dilawar's cause of death
was remarkably similar to that of Habibullah. He died of a pulmonary embolism caused by trauma to his legs
that was so severe that the coroner said his legs were "pulpified," and looked
like they had been run over by a truck.
Had he lived, the coroner later testified, Dilawar's legs would have had
to have been amputated. (Another
note on the importance of photographs: by finding the autopsy pictures of
Dilawar -"Taxi" made a handful of these public for the first time - I confirmed
the findings of the coroner with images of Dilawar's wounds that showed such
extraordinary tissue damage that many were too gruesome to be shown in the film.)

What could have caused such trauma? A criminal investigation revealed that
the Military Police at Bagram had pummeled Dilawar's legs with peroneal strikes,
an "approved" control measure that the MPs had learned one day in their guard
training. It involved slamming
their knees into the nerve endings on Dilawar's thighs. "It drops 'em pretty good," said one
MP.

At first, soldiers told me, they used strikes to control the
122-pound Dilawar because he would often try to take off his hood, perhaps
because he suffered from severe asthma.
Later, as Dilawar continued to moan and cry out for his mother and
father - which MPs, who couldn't understand him, may have mistaken for the
signs of a troublemaker - the guards would pummel him with knee strikes over and over again, just
to shut him up, or sometimes, for their amusement, just to hear him scream
"allah."

Now, at this point, the reader must be thinking: this is the
work of a few bad apples, rogue sadists, mean motherfuckers. Well, having met a number of Dilawar's
guards and interrogators, I don't share that view at all. Most of the young men I met were
physically imposing but polite, soft-spoken and haunted by their experiences.
"Sometimes," said MP Tony Morden, "I feel I should have uh, gone with my own
morality more than what was common."

Some have been convicted by the military of various crimes, including assault and
maiming, and punished with light sentences for their roles in Dilawar's death. They
all admit that they did something wrong, and they accept their punishment. Yet they resent the fact that they were
singled out and prosecuted while their superior officers were barely
investigated for condoning or ordering the crimes that the soldiers committed.

Who was ultimately responsible?

Dilawar and Habibullah died, in part, because they
were hooded and shackled to the wire mesh ceiling of their holding cells for hours at a
time so that the blood flowed to their legs, turning peroneal strikes into
death blows. But the illegal practice of overhead
shackling was not the work of bad apples.
It was routine at Bagram. It was policy.

For reasons no one can explain, and without written orders
that anyone can or is willing to produce, a program of sleep deprivation was
instituted at Bagram whereby MPs would shackle detainees to the ceiling of
holding cells so that if they tried to fall asleep they would be awakened by
the tugging of the handcuffs on their bloody wrists. There was nothing secret about this. There was a regular "sleep dep"
schedule posted on a white board in the prison that was visible to the many
high-ranking officers and Bush Administration officials who toured the prison. (It was only erased and the prisoners
unshackled when the Red Cross visited Bagram.) The office of Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, then commander
of US forces in Afghanistan, was a stone's throw away from the prison.

Off-limits to journalists, the Bagram prison was a showplace
for many touring dignitaries and high-ranking military officers. As Damien Corsetti, a member of the 519th
MI unit told me, "Mr. Rumsfeld's office called our office frequently. Very high
commanders would want to be kept up to date on a daily basis on certain
prisoners there. The brass knew. They saw them shackled, they saw them hooded
and they said right on. You all are doing a great job."

There were other "techniques" in regular use at Bagram: the
use of snarling dogs, deafening music, forced nudity, and, according a number
of soldiers, a kind of low-rent, homemade waterboarding set-up: wetting down a
hood, putting it on a detainee's head and then heating it up to let the steam
to suffocate the detainee.

It should be noted that none of these techniques were interrogation techniques per
se. But they were all in the
service of softening up detainees for interrogation. Other techniques - such as stress positions, like "the
invisible chair," in which the detainee is made to sit as if there were a chair
under him - were used in
interrogations. In Dilawar's case,
however, the beatings to his legs made him unable to sit on "the invisible
chair," during one of his last interrogations. Thinking Dilawar was mocking him when he slid down the wall
and fell on the floor - he couldn't see the deep bruises under his orange jump
suit - his interrogator punished him some more.

Now, let's move on to the results of Dilawar's
interrogation. After all, the
"torture-is-tough-but-necessary" crowd maintains that torture always delivers
the goods. Let's see what
actionable intelligence was obtained: After the third day of trying to find out
about the rocket attack, Dilawar's interrogators concluded that he was utterly
innocent. Yet the beatings continued
for another two days until Dilawar was dead.

To cover-up the fact that the Army had murdered an innocent man, the Army
sent his passengers (who had also been incarcerated at Bagram) to
Guantanamo. There they sat until
March 2004, when military officials concluded that the unlucky passengers
"posed no threat" to American forces and sent them, without explanation, back
home to the peanut fields of Yakubi. Upon further investigation, it turned out that Afgans
who had originally detained Dilawar and his passengers were the very ones who
were actually responsible for the rocket attacks on Camp Salerno. They had a record of arresting
innocents, proclaiming them guilty and turning them over to US troops in order
to curry favor with the Americans.

What happened to Captain Carolyn Wood, the officer in charge
of interrogation at Bagram during Dilawar's incarceration? She was given a bronze star
and sent to Abu Ghraib, just prior to the abuses there. (It appears that, at long last, she may
have been questioned as part of the recent Senate Armed Services Committee
report on detainee treatment.)

Her full testimony - if revealed - should be
instructive. But, as a Captain,
Carolyn Wood was implementing, not formulating policy at either Bagram or Abu
Ghraib. By all accounts, she was a
"can-do" soldier, popular with her soldiers (she would send post cards home to their
families) who was trying to make things work for her superiors. Yet no written orders have been
produced to show us what senior officers had authorized interrogation
techniques in Bagram that were forbidden according to the Army Field Manual. So where did the orders come from?

In her testimony to the Senate, Wood claims that she first
saw a power point presentation about new "aggressive" techniques approved for
Guantanamo in January, 2003. Yet
there was already a very "aggressive" program going on in Bagram - complete
with sleep deprivation and overhead shackling - that resulted in the murder of
two detainees in December 2002.

So the Dilawar story tells us that long before Abu Ghraib,
at about exactly the same time as Mohammed al-Qahtani was being interrogated in
Guantanamo - supposedly in a unique way - under Rumsfeld's "Special Interrogation Program" ("We tortured
Qahtani," said Susan Crawford, a Pentagon official who was in charge of the
Guantanamo military commissions, in an interview with the Washington Post) a
defacto worldwide policy of lawless, cruel, inhumane treatment, often rising to
the level of torture and murder, was in place that had nothing to do with the
explicit authorizations for a few high-value detainees given by the Secretary
of Defense and the Office of Legal Counsel. Is that worth investigating
further? I think so.

On a more basic cultural level, for those who still consider
torture to be "tough" and lawful interrogation to be "weak," I would ask the
following questions. Is it good to
get bad intelligence? Once torture
starts, can it be stopped? Is it
"tough" to brutalize the innocent along with the guilty? Is it a sign of "weakness" to wonder if
captured prisoners might be innocent? Is it "tough" to confront a helpless man
and beat him to death while he is shackled to the ceiling? Is it "tough" to be so panicky that we
abandon our fundamental principles at the first sign of attack?

For Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity (or newfound TV torture
promoter Dick Cheney) the Dilawar story raises the stakes in the
"wussification" debate: for the amusement of your cable tv viewers, would
either of you be willing to undergo the Dilawar treatment?

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Alex Gibney is a documentary filmmaker who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He has won an Emmy, a Peabody, the duPont Columbia Award, and a Grammy.